Marco Rubio Looks in the Mirror and Sees a Republican Obama

FRANKLIN, N.H. — It is a slur that would make most conservatives wince: You’re a Republican Barack Obama.

And for most of his presidential campaign, Marco Rubio — first-term senator, former state legislator, onetime college professor and fresh face for a party with a fusty image — has always had an answer for why the comparison was unfair.

He has more experience than Mr. Obama had when he first ran for president, Mr. Rubio argues. And Mr. Obama is a failure, he says, because of his ideology, not his biography.

But now the Florida senator is taking a sharply different approach. His answer to the often-asked question about how he would be any different from the president is: He wouldn’t, really.

About a half-hour into his town hall meeting here on Wednesday, a 78-year-old retired civil servant named Bill Doherty shot his hand up and said there was something familiar about Mr. Rubio. “An element of hope,” he said. “An attractive family” and “a great story.”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” Mr. Rubio joked, before suggesting that maybe Republicans should look at President Obama’s liberal accomplishments and hope for similar victories of the conservative kind with Mr. Rubio in the White House.

“A liberal Democrat would say Barack Obama has been a pretty influential president,” Mr. Rubio told a crowd of several hundred people finishing a pancake breakfast here. “He got Dodd-Frank, the stimulus, the deal with Iran. All these things that they were able to get done, they’d look at it and say, ‘This guy’s been pretty consequential.’”

Still, Mr. Rubio insisted, don’t take the analogy too far. “He was a community organizer and a backbencher in the Illinois state legislature. So there are huge differences.”

How to address the Obama comparison is a question the Rubio campaign has carefully calibrated. His advisers did not always believe they had it right.

Initially, Mr. Rubio, 44, would respond that he had plenty of experience for someone his age. But political experience in today’s Republican Party, where even the insiders are running like outsiders, is not exactly an asset. So he adjusted the answer to emphasize that Mr. Obama’s experience is not why he became a bad president, but that his bad policies were the problem.

Now, Mr. Rubio has added a new twist to his answer: He damns Mr. Obama with faint praise for his accomplishments like the Affordable Care Act and the financial regulations in the Dodd-Frank legislation.

The Rubio campaign always saw benefits to running as the “Republican Party’s Obama.” Mr. Rubio presents a vivid generational contrast to older Republican rivals and also to Hillary Clinton. And, not unlike Mr. Obama’s, much of Mr. Rubio’s sales pitch to Republican primary voters revolves around his life story: the son of Cuban immigrants, raised in the working class, now aspiring to the highest office in the land.

It is not always an easy sell.

Carla West, 71, a retiree who lives in Berlin, N.H., saw Mr. Rubio speak in her hometown on Tuesday. She peppered him with question after question, on immigration, unemployment and national security.

“I think he’s a young man with high ideals,” she said afterward in an interview. “Ten more years, I’d be more secure in voting for him,” she added, not completely foreclosing the idea of eventually supporting him.

With some older voters, however, the appeal is there. Judy Roy, 58, an administrator at a high school in Berlin, said she was won over. “I thought, O.K., I am a big Hillary fan — or I was in the last election,” she said. “And he’s really making me think about this election now. I think he’s just so intelligent, young. That’s what we need. New ideas. We need many changes.”

Mr. Doherty, who pressed Mr. Rubio on his experience at the Franklin town hall meeting, said he appreciated the senator’s response, in which he confronted his youth head on.

Mr. Rubio told him: “It is true that there are people running for president who have lived longer than I have. What is not true is that anybody running has a better understanding or has shown better judgment on the issues we face.”

Mr. Doherty said later, “I have a great fear of people who come up with simplistic answers for complex problems. We are faced with many difficult questions in the United States today, and we have a lot of people who are willing to do hand-waving and shoot their mouth off.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Rubio Looks in the Mirror and Sees the Republicans’ Obama, Up to a Point . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe